This invention relates to systems and methods for taking samples from biological materials such as seeds.
In plant development and improvement, genetic improvements are made in the plant, either through selective breeding or genetic manipulation, and when a desirable improvement is achieved, a commercial quantity is developed by planting and harvesting seeds over several generations. Not all seeds express the desired traits, and thus these seeds need to be culled from the population. To speed up the process of bulking up the population, statistical samples are taken and tested to cull seeds from the population that do not adequately express the desired trait. However this statistical sampling necessarily allows some seeds without the desirable trait to remain in the population, and also can inadvertently exclude some seeds with the desirable trait from the desired population.